All of Ali's Comments + Replies

Zdgroff - Advocacy for digital minds

I'm excited to see this proposal! Digital minds are our research focus at Sentience Institute. We published a couple papers on it (in Science and Engineering Ethics and Futures), and we're trying to help coordinate and support more research on this. Anyone is welcome to email us info@sentienceinstitute.org if it may be useful.

Thanks, Haven. Yes, it could be a distribution issue. As noted to Max, we get quite a bit of funding, but each hiring round SI receives a large pool of very strong researcher applicants, and we would love to hire more of them. Also, our approach isn't very well-established in the cause areas of either longtermism or animal advocacy, and it can be particularly challenging to fundraise at the intersection of cause areas (as noted by New Harvest here).

Thanks Max! We get a good amount of funding, but each hiring round we receive multiple very strong applicants (e.g., recently graduated PhDs in a very challenging academic job market who are vegetarian or care about MCE-ish issues and would love to unite their passion and their day job) that we would love to hire. We believe we can absorb additional funding to do so, but it can be challenging to fundraise since our work lies at the intersection of animal advocacy and longtermism, and there is also uncertainty with our increased focus on artificial sentienc... (read more)